Science and emotions after 1945 : a transatlantic perspective

439 Pages·1945·2.056 MB·English

by  Biess, Frank, Gross, Daniel M

Science and
Emotions after 1945

Science and
Emotions after 1945
A Transatlantic Perspective
EDITED BY FRANK BIESS
AND DANIEL M. GROSS
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
FRANK BIESS is professor of history at the University of Califor-
nia, San Diego, and the author of Homecomings: Returning POWs and
the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany.
DANIEL M. GROSS is associate professor of English at the Uni-
versity of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Secret History of
Emotion: From Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” to Modern Brain Science.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2014 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-12634-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-12648-7 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-12651-7 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226126517.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Science and emotions after l945 : a transatlantic perspective /
edited by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-12634-0 (hardcover : alkaline paper)—
ISBN 978-0-226-12648-7 (paperback : alkaline paper)—ISBN
978-0-226-12651-7 (e-book) 1. Emotions—Psychological
aspects. 2. Affective neuroscience—History—20th century.
3. Psychology—Germany— History—20th century. 4. P sychology—
United States—H istory—20th century. I. Biess, Frank, 1966– editor
of compilation. II. Gross, Daniel M., 1965– editor of compilation.
BF531.S38 2014
152.409′045—dc23
2013032851
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction: Emotional Returns 1
FRANK BIESS AND DANIEL M. GROSS
PART ONE Neuroscience
1 Humanists and the Experimental Study of Emotion 41
WILLIAM M. REDDY
2 “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula”: Mirror-Neuron
Theory and Emotional Empathy 67
RUTH LEYS
3 Emotion Science and the Heart of a Two-Cultures
Problem 96
DANIEL M. GROSS AND STEPHANIE D. PRESTON
PART TWO Medicine
4 What Is an Excitement? 121
OTNIEL E. DROR
5 The Science of Pain and Pleasure in the Shadow
of the Holocaust 139
CATHY GERE
6 Oncomotions: Experience and Debates in West
Germany and the United States after 1945 157
BETTINA HITZER
v
PART THREE Psychiatry
7 The Concept of Panic: Military Psychiatry and Emotional
Preparation for Nuclear War in Postwar West Germany 181
FRANK BIESS
8 Preventing the Inevitable: John Appel and the Problem of
Psychiatric Casualties in the US Army during World War II 209
REBECCA JO PLANT
9 Feeling for the Protest Faster: How the Self-Starving Body
Infl uences Social Movements and Global Medical Ethics 239
NAYAN B. SHAH
PART FOUR Social Sciences
10 Across Different Cultures? Emotions in Science during
the Early Twentieth Century 263
UFFA JENSEN
11 Decolonizing Emotions: The Management of Feeling
in the New World Order 278
JORDANNA BAILKIN
12 Passions, Preferences, and Animal Spirits: How Does
Homo Oeconomicus Cope with Emotions? 300
UTE FREVERT
13 The Transatlantic Element in the Sociology of Emotions 318
HELENA FLAM
14 Feminist Theories and the Science of Emotion 342
CATHERINE LUTZ
15 Affect, Trauma, and Daily Life: Transatlantic Legal and
Medical Responses to Bullying and Intimidation 365
RODDEY REID
Coda: Erasures; Writing History about Holocaust Trauma 387
CAROLYN J. DEAN
List of Contributors 415
Index 419
INTRODUCTION
Emotional Returns
FRANK BIESS
DANIEL M. GROSS
Writing in 1940, the doyen of American sociology, Talcott
Parsons, outlined what he considered to be the main dif-
ferences between American democracy and German fas-
cism. Among these differences was an emphasis on the
“rationalistic character of [American] culture,” which he
then contrasted to “fundamentalism, not only in religion,
but in any fi eld,” as one characteristic feature of National
Socialism, and which he saw as challenging “the status
of critical rationality in our culture.”1 This diagnosis was
symptomatic of a widespread association of German fas-
cism with political irrationalism and excessive emotion-
ality. In the contemporary American academic discourse
of the 1930s and 1940s, Nazism was often understood in
terms of a collective psychopathology, and this diagnosis
was later extended to communism.2
Postwar Rationalism and the Marginalization
of Emotions after 1945
Leading social scientists’ association of Nazism with exces-
sive emotionalism further enhanced the marginalization
and deep suspicion of emotions in Western social science
that predated the post–World War II period but assumed a
new meaning after 1945. Emotions, at least as far as they
were visible and operative in social and political life, ap-
1
INTRODUCTION
peared largely as symptoms or causes of political and social patholo-
gies and hence did not assume a central place in outlining prescriptive
guidelines for a democratic, antitotalitarian society. While Parsons’s
work is a case in point, he did not discount emotions entirely. In fact,
the contrast between affectivity and affective neutrality constituted the
fi rst pattern variable in Parsons’s explanation of social action.3 Affec-
tive neutrality enabled the renunciation of instant gratifi cation and
hence was instrumental to the stability and the functioning of the so-
cial system. Still, Parsons’s theory offered, in the words of Jack Barbalet,
“a paradigm case of a sophisticated discounting of the signifi cance of
emotion for understanding social processes.”4 On this account emo-
tions fl ourished in the private sphere of the family and friendships but
became increasingly less relevant in higher-ranked “secondary institu-
tions” of the modern state. If anything, unfettered emotions threat-
ened to destabilize the social order and hence needed to be contained
by mechanisms of social control. In this respect, emotions remained
present in postwar social theory yet increasingly represented the irra-
tional, premodern and potentially totalitarian “other” to modern “ra-
tional” liberal democracy.5
Dominant social science paradigms of the postwar period such as
modernization theory and behaviorism reinforced this marginaliza-
tion of emotions. Modernization theory rejected the “emotionality
and spiritualism of romanticism” and propagated instead the “ideals
of the Enlightenment: the power of science, the importance of con-
trol, and the possibility of achieving progress through application of
human will and instrumental reason.”6 Behaviorism did not develop
a theory of emotions but tended to see emotions as conditioned re-
sponses to external stimuli.7 If behaviorists discussed emotions, they
portrayed them—in line with the dominating irrationalism model—as
politically damaging. The political scientist Harold Laswell’s psycho-
pathological model, for example, defi ned emotions as the displacement
of unconscious impulses onto the fi eld of politics.8 In the context of
the highly ideological confl icts of the Cold War, one of the goals of
postwar social science was the containment and management of emo-
tions. As Hunter Heyck has argued, Cold War science aimed at the
“production of reason” by developing models of decisionmaking that
shifted the focus away from the potentially irrational “chooser” to the
process of rational choice or decisionmaking. Emotions were relegated
in this process either to preexisting “givens (like values and prefer-
ences),” or they were “intrusions that short-circuited the normal pro-
cesses of decision.”9 Even psychoanalysis in its Americanized version of
2
EMOTIONAL RETURNS
Table 1: Postwar Rationalism
Psychology/
Philosophy Economics Political Science Sociology Psychoanalysis
Logical positivism Rational choice Habermasa Weber (US) Skinner
Samuelson Rawls Parsons Hartmann
textbookb
Laswell
aA view from the US perspective ca. 1978 is summarized in Ronald Rogowski, “Rationalist Theories
of Politics: A Midterm Report,” World Politics 30.2 (1978): 296–323. German terms for the debate
are famously established in the Positivismusstreit 1961–69, which set Karl Popper’s critical rationalism
against the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, which included Habermas, whose development of
the lifeworld sets the cognitive horizon against a background of practices and competencies, includ-
ing affective. Hence, Habermas is a rationalist only from a limited theoretical perspective.
bPaul A. Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948). For a discus-
sion, see Frevert, chapter 12 in this volume.
ego psychology supported the larger project of postwar rationalization
and normalization. Psychodynamic therapy was supposed to promote
the self- adaption of the individual to the cultural norms of postwar
society, including heterosexuality and the nuclear family. It treated the
individual as, in the words of Ely Zaretsky, a “rational, self-regulating
actor whose maturation would be facilitated by forms of intervention
that refrained from external direction.”10
Postwar “rationalism” thus extended across a variety of disciplines
in the social sciences and beyond. In the spirit of heuristics, not com-
pletism, we offer in table 1 a sketch of this trend marked by a few
key fi gures and schools of thought. This relative marginalization and
pathologization of emotions in midcentury Western social science con-
stituted a distinctly postwar phenomenon, illustrated by a formative
moment in the intellectual development of Jürgen Habermas, whom
we could classify under sociology and philosophy as well as political
science.
In 1953 his fellow student Karl-Otto Apel handed Habermas the re-
issue of Martin Heidegger’s 1935 lectures Introduction to Metaphysics, in
which Habermas encountered antirationalism, including “idolatry of
the nationalist spirit,” Platonist devaluation of “intelligence,” and the
rejection of Enlightenment principles of equality and universalism.11
Upset that this postwar reissue appeared with no meaningful quali-
fi cation of Heidegger’s avowed National Socialism, the twenty-four-
year-old Habermas published a critique in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (July 25, 1953): “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur
Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935” (Thinking
3